February 20, 2013
Keepers of secrets - FOSDEM 09 # The closing keynote was given by Leslie Hawthorn whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year during Berlin Buzzwords. In her talk she shared insights into a topic commonly encountered in open source leadership that is way less often talked about than should be the case: Being in the role of a community leader people will talk to you about all sorts of confidential information and ask you to not share that information with other no matter how beneficial that might be for both parties.
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February 19, 2013
On making Libre Office suck less – a major refactoring effort - FOSDEM 08 # Libre Office is currently in a phase of code cleanup and refactoring that turns the whole code base upside down. What that means is that people need tooling to avoid quality from going down and allow for new features going in without too much risk. The project made good experiences with using gerrit for code review of patches, tinderbox for fast integration testing, strict whitespace checks to avoid unintended mistakes, use clang compiler plugins.
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February 18, 2013
E17 - FOSDEM 07 # I’m really glad the NoSQL room was all packed on afternoon – otherwise I’d have missed an amazing talk by people behind Enlightenment – a window manager that is older than Gnome, nearly older than KDE and has been my favourite choice for years and years (simply because they have sensible default configuration options: focus follows mouse, virtual desktops that allow for desktop switching when moving the mouse close to the screen edges, menu opening when clicking anywhere on the desktop background, options for remembering window placement and configuration on re-boot etc).
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February 18, 2013
Systemd - FOSDEM 06 # As sort of a “go out of your comfort zone and discover new stuff” exercise I went to the systemd – two years later talk next. It’s just plain amazing to see a machine boot in roughly one second (that is not counting the 7s that the BIOS needs for initialization). The whole project started as a init-only project but has since grown to a much larger purpose: An init platform ranging from mobile, embedded, desktop devices to servers many features were just over-due across the board.
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February 17, 2013
Notes on storage options - FOSDEM 05 # On MySQL
Second day at FOSDEM for me started with the MySQL dev room. One thing that made me smile was in the MySQL new features talk: The speaker announced support for “NoSQL interfaces” to MySQL. That is kind of fun in two dimensions: A) What he really means is support for the memcached interface. Given the vast number of different interfaces to databases today, announcing anything as “supports NoSQL interfaces” sounds kind of silly.
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February 16, 2013
AFERO GPL Panel discussion - FOSDEM 04 # The panel started with a bit of history of the AGPL: Born in the age of growing ASP (application service provider) businesses AGPL tried to fix the hosting loop whole in GPL in the early 2000s. More than ten years later it turns out the license hasn’t quite caught traction: On the one hand the license does have a few wording issues.
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February 15, 2013
Mozilla legal issues - FOSDEM 03 # In the next talk Gervase Markham talked about his experience working for Mozilla on legal and license questions. First the speaker summarized what kind of requests he gets most:
There are lots of technical support requests.
Next on the top list is the question for whether or not shipping Mozilla with a set of modifications is ok.
Next is an internal question, namely: Can I use this code?
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February 14, 2013
Trademarks and OSS - FOSDEM 02 # So the first talk I went to ended up being in the legal dev room on trademarks in open source projects. The speaker had a background mainly in US American trademark law and quite some background when it comes to open source licenses.
To start Pamela first showed a graphic detailing the various types of trademarks: In the pool of generic names there is a large group of trademarks that are in use but not registered.
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February 13, 2013
FOSDEM 2013 - 01 # On Friday morning our train left for this year’s FOSDEM. Though a bit longish I have a strong preference for going by train as this gives more time and opportunity for hacking (in my case trying out Elastic Search), reading (in my case the book “Team Geek”) and chatting with other FOSDEM visitors.
Monday morning was mostly busy with meeting people - at the FSFE, Debian, Apache Open Office booths, generally in the hallways.
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September 6, 2012
FrOSCon - understanding Linux with strace # Being a Java child I had only dealt with strace once before: Trying to figure out whether any part of the Mahout tests happens to use /dev/random for initialisation in a late night debugging session with my favourite embedded Linux developer. Strace itself is a great tool to actually see what your program is doing in terms of system calls, giving you the option to follow on a very detailed level what is going on.
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